Annal of a Pandemic: Success is about What We Can Control

The other day, I saw an article by memoirist and writing teacher Marion Roach Smith about writing list memoirs, if writing a full one seems overwhelming. And times, they do seem a bit overwhelming, so I am taking MRS’s advice, which is to lower the bar and offer a few snippets of things happening in my life.

1/ In attempting to teach online, I have learned to lower the bar. Lower the bar, by the way, is a good catchphrase for the era of the virus. Especially if you’re a teacher, as I am, thrust into online teaching, as I have been. There’s much talk of trying to manage to connect with students as best we all can. Scaling back. Simplifying. As my mentor teacher says, take it a week at a time. Also my friend Diane offered that suggestion. And really, readers, I don’t need to be told twice. Lowering the bar is a specialty. So, my goal for my first online class is to take attendance and see if everyone makes it online, if they can hear me and we can hear each other, and ask them how things are going. That’s about it for today.

2/ I made the decision to skip most of the news and it’s going well. So here’s another tip, Readers: ignore things you don’t want to read. There is a lot out there that’s not strictly necessary, especially on social media, and guess what? I don’t have to read it. Neither do you. What a relief! When I ignore the scary graphs and the misinformation and the contradictory advice about masks, I am left with being at home, with a blank page, with my daughters, with a house full of books and old movies, and the ability to breathe, move my body through space, and eat baked goods. As Jon Kabat-Zinn writes in Full Catastrophe Living, if you're breathing, more is right with you than wrong.

3/The college senior found an unopened box of matzoh in the cupboard. Just in time for this year’s Passover, she is finishing last Passover’s matzoh by turning it into chocolate caramel matzoh.

4/The other day, in the spirit of lowering the bar, I skipped my morning workout and spent a lot of time in my bathrobe. Then I decided this won’t do, as I feel that lowering the bar below getting dressed is too low. One must keep up appearances.

5/Reading a five volume family saga set in Great Britain before, during, and right after World War Two turns out to be just the thing for enduring privation. I mean, they didn’t have things like gourmet cheese, or disinfecting wipes. They had those dreadful rations for years after the war, and everyone went about in old suits and darned socks. They barely had heat, for heaven’s sake. Coal rations. So, they practiced ingenuity in confronting scarcity. Also, just reading about learning to eat tinned beans on toast and saving clothing coupons to be able to buy a new outfit, makes me feel plucky. We’ll get through, as the Brits did. And maybe we’ll end up with a better, more equitable healthcare and social safety net, too. What’s the book? The Cazalet Chronicles, by Elizabeth Jane Howard.

6/ In re: number 4/ above—I don’t know about your house, but mine is full of bakers. They’re baking desserts at a terrific pace. It’s nice and all, but I have a terrible sweet tooth, so I’m lobbing suggestions for minty desserts, because I don’t like minty desserts. As I write this, I am trying to help bring butter quickly from freezer temperature to room temperature by holding it in my armpits.

Too much information?

Desperate times and all that jazz…

7/I in no way intend to  make light of the current pandemic, by the way. It’s just that it feels important right now to focus on what I can control. This is Stephen Covey’s first habit of highly effective people. Remember that old chestnut? Seems like the perfect time to revisit the concept of the circle of influence versus the circle of concern.


To refresh your memory, here’s what the diagram represents. The yellow circle is your Circle of Influence. This is the stuff over which you have some control. The blue outer circle is your Circle of Concern. This is the stuff that you’re thinking about, worrying about, fretting over, perseverating about, but really can’t control. So, to bring it down to the current situation, I can control whether I eat one of the Rosie’s Bakery Noah Bedoahs currently getting whipped up in the kitchen, but I cannot control whether they get baked. Apparently. I mean, sure, theoretically, I am the parent, and I could put my foot down. However, both bakers are of age, 18 and 21, and the broader question of how much control I can exert over them comes down on the side of having to hide the flour if I really don’t want them to bake. If you see what I mean. 

So, what can I do? I can eat or not eat a cookie. I can wash my hands before I do that. I can limit my trips to the grocery store. I can stay home. I can enjoy my children being with me. There is so much out of my control, all I can do is try to accept my limits and work within them.

The good news, according to Stephen Covey, is that as you focus on your Circle of Influence, it actually begins to expand towards the edges of the Circle of Concern. In short, if you focus on what you can control, the area that you can affect expands.

Not Every Post is Pithy: Professional Success Decision

Hello, Readers. I have to make a decision. I dislike decision-making. Deciding means giving up something while embracing something else. Deciding means change. Change means scary.

Change is also inevitable and good. Repeat twenty times a day until believed.

I have been accepted to both graduate MSW programs. Now I am deciding between them. What’s an MSW, you may ask. It’s a Masters of Social Work. A do-gooding, pay-nothing professional degree. I want to become a psychotherapist. The goal is to help traumatized children and the worried well. Maybe a sub-speciality of bereaved children. Why? Because I was one. I relate to them. My little neighbors down the street are bereaved twins. Their mother died when they were just two. Now they have a step-mom and they seem to be thriving. I hope they do. It’s a permanent loss, death. Therapy is most likely a must to cope, at least at some point.

Anyway, the decision to go to graduate school in middle age is not one I take lightly. But my definition of success contains the professional element. As in, I don’t feel successful without having a profession. Writing has not worked out as well as I would have liked. Meaning that I haven’t attained enough professional success with it to be able to call that my profession. To have that be my professional leg of the success chair. Other legs being health, family, friends. And, Readers, something in me is pushing me outward. My children are leaving home. I am confident the high school senior will get in to one of the nine colleges to which she has applied and she will leave, just as the college senior has left. We have entered a new phase, one of continual leaving and visiting and leaving and it’s never living together again.

This is sad. So very sad. It’s also what parenting success is. The fledglings fledge. They flit, they float, they fleetly, fleetly fly, leaving the momma bird to her middle age spread, hypochondria, and a big choice: how to deal with the next portion of life. The answer for me is to become something else, now that being mom is not a 24/7 physical, mental, and emotional full time job.

I have a friend around my age who keeps saying she is dying. She's actually very fit and healthy, and when she says it, she's not being a hypochondriac, she's being pragmatic. I think she’s preparing herself for the eventuality. I admire her willingness to stare at that old Death right in the punim and prepare herself by saying, yeah, I’m coming, eventually. But the other day, when she said it, I said, You’re no more dying today than you were ten years ago. After all, we’re always dying, if you want to look at it that way; but if you look at it that way, then just because you’re a particular age, say fifty-five, doesn’t mean you’re dying more than you were.

Is that crazy of me to say? I know that the longer I’ve lived, the more years I have eluded death, the more inevitable death becomes. But the whole idea of coasting downhill I reject. We are alive until we are not, and that has been true since the moment I was born, yanked out of my mother’s body by forceps, I believe. This is why my head is so misshapen. I hope I never lose my hair.

The point is, I know myself too well to think I can spend the next quarter of my life at home, being introspective, without developing some serious hypochondria worthy of a Jane Austen character. (The husband and I just reread Persuasion for our book group.) I need to get out in the world, and out of myself. I need to do something that helps others. Something that is definitely a profession, so when people ask me what I do, do being italicized, I can answer with something that makes me proud.

I guess it came down to how much I want to work on myself. I could continue to try to accept myself just as I am and to work at feeling I have done enough. I could continue to meditate on and rationalize that success does not have to mean success as a professional woman, and that the problem and solution lie within my attitude towards myself. If I can just accept myself as being enough, then all will be well.

Or I could say, well, a professional identity is important to me. I’m a Gen X woman, bred to be a multi-tasking superwoman, and I don’t have to struggle to let go of that aspect anymore. I can embrace the desire for a professional identity now. I can accept myself AND I can move into something else for this stage of life.

There's another facet to this gem. The whole hierarchy of needs developed by Maslow*. He theorized that we are all born with a motivation to self-actualization, meaning to develop our full potentials.

https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow-5.jpg

Later, he updated his theory to say that we're motivated to a step beyond self-actualization, to self-transcendence.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcT73r0BDyaV9gaDr4gHn6koIMWAz_uOgBwf_jV6ABMIv3gkJDce

This stage is characterized by a desire to take one's accumulated knowledge and share it with others for their benefit. Perhaps Maslow had it right. Maybe I am at that stage.

So now I choose: the more prestigious, more expensive, much more inconvenient program with a more ideal curriculum, or the close to home, less expensive program with the adequate curriculum.

Thoughts?

* Here is a good summary, with visual aids, of Maslow's theories: https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html

This Week's News

I have been massaging kale. That's my first piece of news. 

I know, kale is over. The kale bandwagon rounded the corner months ago, with its cargo of green smoothies and super food Caesar salads trundling out of sight. Kale is over, but I don’t care. I’m not a trend-setter. I’ve only just begun massaging it. I don’t really like massaging things, but kale takes some massaging to make it good. Or goodish. Honestly, why the fuss over kale? It’s kind of bland. Stiff and bland when fresh, slightly broken down and still bland, but a little salty, after massage. Kind of like me, actually.

[Every day in every way, gosh darn it....I like myself, gosh darn it. I’m as good as kale, gosh darn it.] 

So, yes, gosh darn it, I have been massaging kale, and then dressing it in a pomegranate-based dressing. How dated. How 2016. How like a different era.

Perhaps that’s why I like massaging kale, Readers. Kale takes me back to a different era. Afterwords, I relax by re-watching a movie set in a different era. Like “Sense and Sensibility,” with Emma Thompson and Hugh Grant and Hugh Laurie and Imelda Staunton. It’s so nice to lounge on the couch and watch people observe social norms and have things work out so very, very well in the end. As I told the husband, all that is required is for one of the characters to come down with a very bad cold, also known as a “putrid throat,” and then things have a way of working themselves out.

Never mind that Emma and Hugh were far too old for their parts - they played them beautifully. And perhaps it was better they were older, because watching mere children fall in love and have putrid throats might come across as a wee bit implausible, given our current views on the marrying age. I mean the marrying age among my set. Or bubble. The marrying age in my bubble is higher than it is in other parts of the country. In other bubbles. And higher than it was back in Jane Austen’s bubble. Oh, that gorgeous wedding scene with the magnificent, decorated cake on a beribboned stick makes for just the sort of inaugural celebration I like. Never mind that what comes after the wedding is never Jane Austen’s concern. I don’t need to bother with it, either. 

Did you know that inhabitants of Las Vegas consume 60,000 thousand pounds of shrimp per day? I do, thanks to Calvin Trillin’s amusing musing on the topic in The New Yorker.* I love Calvin Trillin. I’d like to be as clever as he - and published in The New Yorker. 

The husband read Trillin’s piece out loud. This is news because I don’t like to be read aloud to. I like to do the reading aloud. But he did it really well. All that shrimp. My, my. It made me feel better, that article. Not because of the shrimp. I’m not a big fan of shrimp. But that Calvin Trillin had to devote so much insomnia to those shrimp. Yes, it made me feel better to know I have not been alone, awake at four a.m., trying to think of my shrimp equivalent. 

In other news, I watched, “Singin’ In the Rain” with the college student. Her idea, not mine, I swear. It did fit my agenda, however, to disappear into another era. I spent a lot of time thinking about how bad I would look in all those flapper clothes. But I do like a sparkle, a silk, a faux fur.  And, lo and behold, things worked out for Don Lockwood and Kathy Selden, and the bad gal gets her comeuppance. She’s not a classy dame, and she gets hers. 

Yeah, that’s a feel-good film.  

A last update: I read Everybody’s Fool by Richard Russo. I won’t spoil it for you by saying that there are a lot of underachievers in the book. If you know Russo, you know he specializes in the second rate denizens of second rate towns. In this book, a sequel to Nobody’s Fool, which came out in the 1990s, both of the main characters spend a lot of time thinking about how their 8th grade English teacher nagged at them. Since they’re from a small town, they interact with her throughout their lives.  Or throughout hers. She's dead when Everybody's Fool opens. She, Miss Beryl, nagged Raymer by asking him who he really was. She nagged Sully by asking if he didn’t ever feel bad that he hadn’t done more with his life. Despite the double negative, the message is clear. She saw potential in him and felt frustrated that he didn’t seem to want to fulfill it. And he, now 70, thinks about that. He realizes that yes, sometimes, he does feel bad about it. But most of the time he doesn’t. That may not be all right with Miss Beryl, but ultimately, that doesn’t matter. Sully accepts himself. Unlike Raymer, he has some idea of who he is. He may not think much of himself, or ask much of himself, but he’s all right. I’m not like Sully, but perhaps I’d be better off if I were. 

Well, Readers, that’s all the news for now. I wish you a happy week. 

*http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/16/tossing-and-turning

Pithy Advice From Books

I love pithy advice from books.
This week, while I await news of the 12th grader's college acceptances, I have not much original to share. But this great passage from Forty Rooms, by Olga Grushin, appealed:

"Papa, do you believe there is any meaning to life?" I blurted out.
"The meaning of life - the meaning of a single, individual human life, since I assume that is what you are asking - consists of figuring out the one thing you are great at and then pushing mankind's mastery of that one thing as far as you are able, be it an inch or a mile. If you are a carpenter, be a carpenter with every ounce of your being and invent a new type of saw. If you are an archaeologist, find the tomb of Alexander the Great. If you are Alexander the Great, conquer the world. And never do anything by half."

I think if Papa had stopped talking after saying figure out what you're great at and push mankind's mastery of it as far as you are able, inch or mile, I would feel totally great about his answer. It's an exhortation to be your best and to work hard and contribute to the collective knowledge.

But then he lays on the expectations. Don't just be a carpenter, invent a new type of saw! Don't just be an archaeologist, be an archaeologist who finds a really important, famous relic! Don't just be the head of something, conquer the freakin' world!

Expectations are necessary, but also dangerous. As a parent, I understand the impulse to expect great things from my children. As a person struggling under both lack of expectations from people who knew me as a child and super high expectations of myself, I think the second half of his answer stinks. How many new kinds of saws are possible? How many tombs of mighty conquering emperors exist? How many Alexanders can there be? Most of us need to find a way to succeed and build meaningful lives in humbler ways. On the other hand, without expectations to rise to, maybe we won't discover our inner Alexander.

If Papa said, "Figure out who you are and what you're good at doing - and like to do - and then work really hard at it," that would be the best thing he could say.

Well, Papa didn't say it, but I did. Now I'm going to try to remember it while we are waiting, waiting, waiting. And afterwords, too. That's when it will really matter.

Success and the Ooze of Life

Time is out of joint

Scene: Kitchen. Three women, two on the passenger side of a kitchen island. One on the cockpit side, deveining shrimp. All three are mothers. One is a professor, one is a painter of the visual artist variety, not the interior/exterior house variety, and the third is a writer. The professor is cooking. The other two are her guests. What I left out of those job descriptions is that two of the three have “and stay-at-home-mom” appended to them. Can you guess which two? That’s correct, the painter and the writer. The professor, although also a mother, doesn’t have any explanatory appendage to her job description.

What does this mean? Does it mean that being a mother isn’t part of her job? Her only job is the academic post? 

Does it mean that the painting and the writing don’t equal “real” jobs? Or that they are part-time? Maybe that, huh? 

The painter says, “I still hold myself to that Nineteen-fifties ideal.” 

I think about this. Donna Reed’s famous New Look dress and coiffed hair comes up in the brain register automatically. But is that what the painter means? She’s younger than I, and I am too young, actually, to have watched Donna Reed. Yet I know her as shorthand for 1950s housewife, cook, ever-pleasant, perfect-house, homemade-everything Mom.

The point here is that after a second, I thought maybe I needed to clarify that we were all talking about the perfect housewife, cook, cleaner, child-minder. Because this painter doesn’t look at all like Donna Reed. I'm pretty sure she's not secretly longing to change her jeans for a pouffy circle skirt and set hair, but I want to make sure she’s talking Ideal Mother. The mother who is put together herself, and keeps the whole house together and never raises her voice. Now, in the 21st Century.

Yes, the painter says, that is what she meant. And by holding herself up to that standard, she is failing: because she likes to be with her children, to take them to the park and the playground. That means she gets tired with them, and when she gets home, there is all the rest of that Ideal Mother crap to deal with. With which to deal. However, she doesn’t “really” do it. The house is messy and the meals are thrown together. So the housework is not a priority; and cooking square meals isn’t either. But still the idea that it should be hovers. She feels guilty that she’s not doing more. As if minding the children isn’t enough - well, to be exact, as if minding the children and painting isn’t enough. 

And like the writer, the painter finds it really hard to make time for painting, since the nature of childcare is that it oozes to fill all spaces. Like spray insulation. Or Silly Foam. So there is guilt about not painting enough, and guilt about not houseworking and cooking enough. And general frustration, too. Very familiar to me. 

Meanwhile, the professor. When we turn to her I say, Well at least you know if everything goes south - if your husband dies  or loses his job - you can provide for your family. I am totally dependent on mine, financially. 

Yes, says the painter. That’s another way we feel like 1950s housewives. There is tremendous guilt and inadequacy around not earning money. As good feminists, we object to this dependent status. As artists we need it, especially since were we to take on jobs, most likely teaching or something else not particularly lucrative, we would spend our non-kid hours doing work that was secondary to what we wanted to do, spend our tired hours with our kids, and turn over most of our paychecks to childcare. 

The professor says she does feel that her work is very creative and fulfilling; but it is overwhelming and nonstop, even when she comes home. So she feels stretched thin as a parent and as if she is barely getting that done. Guilt, guilt, and more guilt.

Seems to me that because her job is paid and she is accountable to others, her students and her department, that work starts to ooze around the family life that she also wants to have. So she feels overwhelmed by the demands of her work. Whereas the painter and I feel overwhelmed by the demands of the parenting work and our desire to do our personal, creative work. Because we are accountable to ourselves to do that personal work, it’s very hard to enforce the boundaries; therefore, that creative work often gets short changed. There are questions of legitimacy relating to money and to self-confidence in valuing what we do when we do it for nothing and no one for a lot of the time. That applies to the creative “work” we do as well as to the other creative stuff we do called raising children. We can’t call it work, except amongst ourselves, because it’s not considered legitimate “work” unless we earn something tangible from it like money. Or prestige. Prestige counts sometimes, too, intangible though it is. As Anne-Marie Slaughter points out in her new book, (haven’t read) and in this interview (have read), one of the major issues we face societally is that we devalue childcare, or care of any kind. So those of us who spend much of our days doing that kind of work feel crappy about ourselves. Therefore, we insist we have to also fit in a full-throttle creative kind of work, like writing or painting. Then we feel crappy about ourselves because really, caring for young children is full time work and there is just not a lot left over to do the so-called “work.” 

Bottom line: We are all stretched thin, “working” and “not-working.”  We each need to be able to institute boundaries around our time, so we can do that thing we’re supposed to do - have it all. We all need it, but life as currently structured makes it too hard to do that satisfactorily. It’s not sufficient to say we can have it all, just not at the same time; because the teeter-totter nature of balance is, well, kind of stressful.

The state of women. Is this how we want life to be? 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2015/10/21/nurses-fathers-teachers-mothers-why-do-we-devalue-someone-the-minute-they-care-for-others/

Motherhood Check-In

So this morning started out well - and by well I mean poorly. I rearranged the carpool schedule to make it to a physical therapy appointment at 8 am, at a place twenty minutes away, because everything is twenty minutes away from me, except the coffee shop and the library, the reasons I liked this town; anyway, I arrived, parked askew because I was a minute late, and discovered that my appointment was for a different day. Yup. 

Then I had to decide whether to drive all the way home and then back out again for my next appointment (dermatologist for annual skin check), also twenty minutes away, or whether to go somewhere for coffee. Naturlich, I had no book with me, because I’d been running late. So I had to buy a magazine. So I went to the coffee shop near my next appointment and read Psychology Today. 

Well, so here’s a thing. Never one to miss an opportunity for reassurance, I finally did ask the dermatologist about my itchy feet. Remember those? The dermatologist said I had itchy feet because of dry skin - and offered a solution. The solution involves a solution, a solution of baking powder and water. I’m to soak my feet in this solution, then dry them, then apply a heavy moisturizing cream. I’m to do so for several days in a row, and then, voilà. This will make me feel better than getting a cheap pedicure at the local nail salon where the workers might be abused and poisoned, according to my favorite paper. 

In other news, in case you haven't noticed, both my children are teens now. This means that when I make myself available to them after school by lingering around the kitchen and doing dishes, there is no converstaion. Both are bowed over their electronic devices and simultaneously inhaling snacks. Silence is broken only by requests for money or signatures on school forms. 

At this point, I’m the chauffeur. They’ve figured out my old scam that allowed me to eavesdrop on their conversations. All I had to do back then, once upon a time, when they shushed one another in front of me, was say, “Oh, don’t worry. I can hear you, but I don’t know what you’re saying. I don’t speak kid.” Then they’d resume talking in front of me. "Don't worry, she doesn't speak kid," I heard one of them say to another friend once and I did a (internal) victory dance.

Those days are gone. Now I’m password-excluded from their Instagram and Tumblr accounts and text messages. Never mind that the experts insist parents should have those passwords and be checking those accounts regularly. Not happening in my house. I can’t remember my own passwords. What am I going to do about theirs? And they keep changing them anyway. And making other accounts that I don’t know about. Except that I know about their existence. 

At this point, as Madeleine Levine unreassuringly pointed out in her book Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success, my influence is basically nil. It’s all peers all the time now. So if I haven’t imprinted upon my offspring to this point, tough luck. "Tough titties" as we used to say with a giggle back in fourth grade. Childhood is really not a time of innocence, Readers.

On top of that, I read in the Sunday NYTimes that daughters of working mothers earn 23% more than daughters of stay-at-home-mothers (SAHM’s). This led to a (totally not at ALL defensive) conversation last night after our family meeting about how I am not “just” a SAHM. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Ahem, ahem. But that I do work professionally - I’m a writer. I just don’t earn any money to speak of. But I work. Do they think of me as working, I inquired? They, being somewhat clever children, quickly responded that of course they think of me as working. 

Then I said, "Well, my feeling is this. If it turns out that it is better for you that I am a working mother, then I am a working mother. If it is better for you that I am a SAHM, then that is what I am. Because that is what I’m about. What is best for you."

And I have to say, that gave at least one of them pause. I saw it. The pause it gave her. So there was a moment when one of them was listening. I’ll take it. 

Happy New Year Goals

With my new device, which will not take over my life

Welcome to 2015. Happy New Year. My rhinovirus and I wish you the healthiest, happiest of years. May you flourish. (Not you, Rhinovirus. May you wither and die.)


I realize I've been AWOL, and perhaps more about that later. Or perhaps not. Perhaps there's nothing more to say than, I've been busy. It's been winter break. We've celebrated Christmas here like good, secular Jews with WASP ancestry. (Bagels and lox for breakfast, Stilton cheese and leftover Chinese food for snack, and roast beast for dinner.) We've had a small New Year's Eve party. What's left to say?

Rhinovirus. Yeah, shut up.

Anyway, now's that time of year when everyone sets goals. So I thought, since success and goal setting are indubitably linked, that I could offer perhaps a word or two regarding goals.

• Don't go crazy with the goal-setting. 

• Remember to set appropriate goals. An appropriate goal is challenging but not frustratingly out of reach. I will master Ashtanga Series Four by March, for example, is doomed. 

• An appropriate goal is specific. I will eat less chocolate is vague. What is "less," really? Anything you say it is, really.  I will only eat six squares of chocolate per sitting – er, day. Er, week. That's specific. But remember to be realistic. (Er, sitting.) 

• To achieve your specific, realistic but challenging goal, use mental contrasting – visualize achieving your goal, by all means, but also be sure to think about the challenges you will encounter along the way and how you will overcome them. Each journey begins with a single step and all that jazz.

Such is my wisdom for you, Readers. A couple days late, but it’s really never too late to set a goal. 

As for myself, this year I am not making any particular resolutions, except to continue to work on my systems that I already have more or less in place. Morning stretches to stop from freezing into immobility; regular exercise of various kinds, such as walking, NIA, Pilate's, Zumba, the occasional sprint, the NY Times 7 Minute Workout. Writing. Centering myself sporadically. 

It occurs to me that these are actually habits. I wish to maintain and strengthen them. A habit is something done pretty much automatically. As a result, performing it doesn't use up a lot of willpower. Willpower is then available for achieving other actual goals. So what does it mean that my goal is to continue strengthening my habits? 

Admittedly, the meaning seems to be that perhaps my "system" isn't quite as habitual as I'd like it to be. Therefore, I don't have a lot of willpower left over for new goals. I'm still working on habit formation of these old ones. 

(Deflates a little.)

Bottom line: I already have enough goals. It would be crayzee to add many more. 

I'm a firm believer in that old adage, "Moderation in all things." This came up just the other day. January 1st, to be precise. Our friends, the husband, and I were walking the dog and racking up steps on our fitness monitors. For some reason, and I'm not sure why, right after we had to pause to pick up the dog's poop and our friends walked in circles rather than forgo a few seconds of step-acquisition on their fitness monitors, a spirited discussion ensued on the second part of this old saying. Is it Moderation in all things, EXCEPT moderation? Or is it Moderation in all things INCLUDING moderation? 

I know I could just look it up, but the thing is, I don't really want to know. 

Oh, okay. I looked it up. Apparently Ralph Waldo Emerson was the one who said, "Moderation in all things, especially moderation."

But Horace said it earlier. 

Est Modus in Rebus

According to my Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, there's nothing further than that. "There is moderation in everything." Sans part B.

So, I guess we can't really know. We must decide for ourselves. 

Judging by the amount of baked brie consumed over New Year's at my house, the answer is clear. 

And now, I'm off to find a tissue. After that I plan to walk in circles around my kitchen island to rack up steps on my fitness monitor. So, what do you think of that? 

Fulfillment Depends on Success

Simmering Stew of Fulfillment

So a couple of weeks ago,this piece in the Sunday Review came out when we were in Boston visiting colleges with the 11^th grader. It’s about fulfillment, which the author, a 66 year old woman called Emily Fox Gordon (EFG) describes as “an outlandishly oversized gift,” and I would have missed it, if not for a friend sending me the link.

The article turned out to be a fitting counterbalance to the kick-off of what people have indicated is a very anxiety-producing process. At first read, it’s a reminder to consider the scope of a whole life, to keep in perspective this college thing, rife as it is with symbolism. Or actual reality, really, of the young ‘un stepping out into her independent life. College is important, sure, but it’s not necessary to turn getting in into a completely fraught situation. This is a long-winded way of saying that I don’t want my child to drive herself into the ground in pursuit of acceptance to some top school. So remembering what life goals are worth striving for can put the process into perspective. For me, I mean. To prevent adding to the pressure she puts on herself.

Fulfillment. That’s an interesting goal for old age. I must have mentioned before that I used to wish for wisdom when I am old. Now that I know a bit more, I’m thinking, “Uh-oh, careful what you wish for, Hope.” Wisdom. Yeesh. That can be scary. Like considering the futility or absurdity of existence. Do I really want to grok life that way? Perhaps not. Fulfillment seems a better goal. Growing old and feeling fulfilled is definitely on my wish list. Even if EFG says, “it’s a dubious gift, because you receive it only when you’re nearing the end.” Well, it’s a gift I’ll take, if I can. According to EFG, fulfillment is milder than happiness, because it contains detachment and perspective, which I agree are not usually linked to moments of happiness.

So. Fulfillment. I could go for that. Who couldn’t?  Well, I’ll tell you who couldn’t: a failure. That’s right, EFG says so right in her essay. 

“A failed life can’t be a fulfilled one.”

Uh-oh.

“It has to have been a success.”

Yikes.

“It has to have been a success, though not necessarily the documentable kind. It can be a parental or marital or civic success, or an entirely private one….”

Ok. That’s better. Because, so far, mine has been mostly undocumented.

“But success is only a necessary condition.”

Oh. Go on.

“A life of brilliant accomplishment that ends at 40 can’t have been fulfilled.”

I suppose not. Though we could argue about that, at least when thinking about war heroes or something. People devoted to a cause, or thrust into situations requiring heroism, who die in pursuit of their ideals. 

“Years are a requirement. One must have lived most of a standard lifetime, and be inclined to assess it.”

Sounds plausible. I fully intend to. Since I’ve been assessing my life all along, why would I stop?

Upon closer examination, apparently, fulfillment turns out to be a complicated, slow-cooked stew. Success simmered with ambition and one’s relationship to ambition figures as well. Time passing and perspective are necessary ingredients, as is a smidge of detachment. This recipe involves care and attention, Readers. It’s not crockpot pulled pork, which just requires a little Coke, a lot of onions, a hunk of meat and you’re done.

This reminds me that in all my discussions about success, the people who have felt most successful are those who feel that their ambition and their accomplishments are in balance with one another. Those who feel unsuccessful may have unrealized ambitions gnawing at them; or they may not even realize what their ambitions are. Sometimes it’s hard to untangle them from all the knots of obligation and everyday goings-on.

Although, not to be a fly in the ointment, isn’t fulfillment just another emotion and therefore as fleeting and intermittent as all emotions? If all emotions are insubstantial, why is any one emotional state better than another to aim for?

Hmmm. So maybe fulfillment isn’t something to aim for; maybe, like happiness, it’s a byproduct of a well-lived life. Which brings me back to the basic question of how to determine what a well-lived life is. Which brings me back to accomplishments. Outcomes. Successes.

At least with accomplishments, you can remind yourself of them by pulling out those report cards or awards or whatever. They are tangible. I can see I’m getting into trouble here. My anxiety level is ramping up. Must have accomplishments and successes to feel intermittent fulfillment later on in life.

Accomplishments. Oy. What if you’re getting a bit long in the tooth for racking up accomplishments of your own?

Oh, that’s what your children are for. Right? So maybe that whole detachment-fulfillment-step back-and-review-life thing is a total crock of baloney. Maybe after all the best approach to life, especially if you have unrealized ambitions and dreams, is to foist them on those children who have sucked up so much of your time and energy that you have failed to achieve your own. 

So get that kid into the most prestigious college possible. Make sure she has high expectations and do what you can to help her claw her way towards them. Lean in, lean over, lean on. Otherwise, what will you buoy your faltering self-esteem with in your declining years?

Phew. I feel better now. I was lost in a wilderness of contentment for a few moments. Now I'm back. I’m hoping for a Nobel Prize or an Oscar out of them. Or both. Yeah, both. Why not dream big for those kids? They’re just starting out.

*

On a much lower note, I am overcome by a need for new jeans. Now that higher rise jeans are back in favor, I cannot bear my jeans. Things are welling over there. I need a higher rise to lock and load – a term I learned from "What Not To Wear." Stacey and Clinton used it to refer to proper fitting bras, but  I’m talking about my hips. It’s my prerogative. Just as it’s my prerogative to totally understand the whole free range kid movement, and be unable to join it, fully.

Maybe if I rack up a few accomplishments of my own, I can relax about where my kids go to college. So, I guess fulfillment will have to wait, because I’m firing up my ambition. I will start with new jeans. Believe me, that's a challenge.

Success and the Inner Rabbit

November is over. NaNoWriMo is over. And apparently, so is my writing habit. I know, say it isn’t so. Well, look, I accomplished the goal of writing 50K words of a first draft in November. Fifty thousand words - and some. I wrote at least 1,667 words every day but one. (1,667 X 30=50,000). It felt great. And then December hit. 

What happened? I thought I’d developed my habit. A habit takes about twenty-one days to establish. The daily words didn’t even take all that long, since what I was writing mostly was drivel. I say that without having looked back over my work, yet; but I am sure most of it is drivel. And I haven’t finished my draft. Therefore, I need to produce more drivel. I can work with drivel. Drivel I can revise. But now that the companionship of the other 300,000 people who signed up for NaNoWriMo has dwindled, my writing habit has gone pffffft. Part of it has to do with the busy season. The children have started all their end of semester performances. There are all kinds of things that end up sliding into the work week hours, therefore, because the weekends are taken up with rehearsals and performances. Also, the husband is on call right now, which means interrupted sleep on top of perimenopausal interrupted sleep.

But these are excuses. The real reason is that fear has slowed me down. Once the artificial deadline and word count goal of November 30^th passed, my structure disappeared. November was squeezing through a narrow passageway that took all my focus to inch through, doubts and fears about my eventual accomplishment notwithstanding; and then December was

One of many distractions....

coming out the other side of the passage into a vast open space. I’m like a little rabbit, paralyzed by the shadow of a predator overhead.

I’m not sure, in this analogy, what the overhead predator stands for in my life; but you get the idea, Readers, don’t you? My point is the wide open spaces and the blinding light are too much for my Inner Rabbit. The answer seems to be to dart hither and yon until I can create another tunnel-like situation for myself, a place to burrow and write that squeezes the self doubt and fears, if not out entirely, because frankly that seems impossible, to the side.

The question becomes, then, how to do that? Recently, I read a book called Saved, by Ben Hewitt, a journalist who spent a year hanging out with a friend of his who lives off the grid. The financial crisis of 2008 awakened in him the realization that he didn’t know anything about money. So he wanted to follow around this happy go lucky dude who had almost zero of the filthy stuff. Anyway, my takeaway from Ben’s experience was a new understanding of the phrase, “Time is money.” When he looked closely at his friend Eric, bartering for whatever he couldn’t do or get for himself, he saw a free person. Free because he chose what was important enough for him to spend his time - his days, his hours, his minutes doing. Most of those things had nothing to do with earning money. There were many, many ways he could spend his hours and end up earning money; but they weren’t worth the trade off to Eric. Hanging out with Eric, Ben began to think about how many hours it would take of money-earning work to afford, for example, a new car, and began to consider whether that trade was worth making. Because, how you spend your time is how you live. It’s how you pass your life. Maybe a used car would be better. Or a bike.

Whatever we need to do to get that sense of urgency, maybe we should do it. Maybe it’s procrastination. I know, that sounds just plain contrary. But maybe scrunching up against a deadline is the best way to produce a result. I don’t really think so, actually, and I just read somebody’s article about realizing how procrastination was damaging her career because she never produced her best work, just work that met the deadline.

So what would be best would be to have that understanding of life being finite all the time, so you can make sure you focus. That sounds awful, just like those lifeline timers you can download to your desktop that tell you how much longer you have to live. Yikes.

I’m conflating two needs here. (I’m allowed to do that. It’s my blog.) There’s the need to accomplish stuff. Stuff seems to get done best with a sense of urgency, a looming deadline breathing down the neck. I can just hear my former housemate from East Germany ridiculing my very American emphasis on progress and producing. Is it possible not to have a need to accomplish at least something?

The other need is to appreciate the value of life. This could actually lead to ignoring deadlines altogether and channeling one’s inner Ferdinand. Smelling the flowers, being in the moment, or – of this my former housemate from East Germany would approve – drinking beer and having involved conversations with friends about appreciating the value of life. Appreciating the value of life, unfortunately, often requires a shock involving realization of mortality. The beautiful mundane never seems so beautiful as when you wake up after surgery, for example, and discover you are still here.

Good thing I don’t like beer. Because if there’s one thing that sidelines my drive to accomplish stuff, it’s fear. Which brings me back where I started. I do want to finish my sh**ty first draft. So I will simply have to find another tunnel.

Fall Back, then Leap In

Thought for November: I’m challenging myself. That’s my new plan. Not that I don’t challenge myself. I mean, writing a book is a challenge. Only I haven’t been writing that book consistently enough to feel like I’m really in it, really doing it. 

This comes on the heels of last week’s post about realizing that when I feel stuck – waiting to be pronounced upon was my exact description of the situation – the system collapses, partly because I don’t challenge myself as much as I could. I’ve been thinking about The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. I’ve written about it here. I’ve been thinking that my system breakdowns are possibly due to resistance. Resistance being the enemy of art, according to Pressfield. To break down resistance, therefore, I am challenging myself.

Challenge the First: Running. Since the weather’s turning yucky, I’m taking my exercise back to the Y and I’m working out harder. Choosing a tougher workout with Kimmy. Why? Because I’m capable of running faster and I want to challenge myself to actually do it. Also - and this may be a slightly stronger motivator – a lot of research shows that intense, shorter workouts may be more effective at staving off middle age spread than longer, more leisurely ones. So I’m mixing it up. Adding a couple shorter, faster runs to my routine. I know I’m supposed to accept my body changing as I grow older. I know I’m supposed to be grateful for the opportunity to grow older. It’s just that vanity and my secret vision of myself as a 5’6” leggy ectomorph won’t let go of me. In short, I’m just not ready for my Spanx to roll down my belly when I tuck into dinner. On those rare occasions when I might want to struggle into them because I’m going “out.”  So there.

Challenge the Second: NaNoWriMo. It’s November, which means another National Novel Writing Month has come around, and I’ve decided to make use of it. No, I’m not going to write a novel. In fact, the very idea of writing a novel in a month is laughable. My novels have taken 9, 4, and 5 (that last unfinished) YEARS to write. However, since I underestimate my abilities regularly, I decided to try to crank out the verbiage this year in November, while the 260, 000 plus souls who have registered for NaNoWriMo crank out theirs. I’m going to go for 50, 000 words, too, but unofficially. I’m going to write a draft of my nonfiction book. In November. The Anne Lamott (also the Hope Perlman) way: by writing a shitty first draft, no looking back until it’s over. The month and the draft. 

I'm trying to change this:

 into one of these:

What will these challenges do for me? Well, the exercise challenge has obvious benefits. All those health benefits. I’ve always been sold on those. Indeed, I’m one of those people who doesn’t feel right if I pass a day with no exercise at all.

A hidden benefit of upping the challenge here is that I will be exercising my willpower, too. I’ll be challenging myself to run faster for longer. This will take extra willpower beyond the willpower to get out and get moving. And exercising willpower strengthens it, and strengthened willpower in one area frees up willpower in other areas, too.

Another benefit of my challenges will be (let’s hope) that I establish a new habit. Since well-known research has proved that establishing a new habit takes about twenty-one days, if I increase my word output to approximately 1600 words a day for thirty days, I may well have a great routine in place to carry me through those system breakdowns when they threaten in future. Momentum. So that the next time the system breaks down, it's less of a total collapse than a slowdown.

A final benefit of challenging myself may be that I get into the habit of doing just that. I break myself of whatever fear of failure or of success, of whatever remnant of shame or who-knows-what (maybe my sister the psychoanalyst knows what) keeps me keeping my expectations low. I know, I know, if your expectations are low, you won't be disappointed. But, frankly, that's actually just a load of hooey. You can live in a state of continual semi-disappointment that way, which may be worse than living with the aftereffects of full on disappointments. 

Now I’ve told you about my challenges, Readers, so I will have to abandon my blog and crawl into a hidey-hole if I fail to stick to them. C'mon, somebody else join the challenge, too!

Grit: True Marker of Success

I’m thinking about perseverance. Grit. Stamina. Why? Well, the husband showed me this article about Carol Dweck’s research on mindset, motivation, and success, which talks about how to praise children. The wrong kind of praise extinguishes their will to try harder. The basic idea is that praise should be specific and focused on effort, not on labeling a quality of mind. Say, “I love how hard you worked and how much you improved since last time,” not, “You’re so smart - you’re my little genius.” Now, actually, as my mother-in-law noted, psychologist and parenting expert Haim Ginott and his proteges Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish said this very thing in the 1970s and 1980s; now research has proved them right. Luckily I read Haim Ginott when my kids were little (props to the MIL), and Faber and Mazlish, so I have done everything perfectly through much perseverance and grit regarding them and they have turned into persevering little cusses, if I do say so. Not a wrong word uttered ever. Parenting 101? I wrote that curriculum.

I am not serious, Readers. Please. You know me. I’m nothing if not questioning of every single, eensie, tiny decision I make, as well as practically undone by every single large decision I’m forced to make. But not totally undone, because I may lack physical grit, but I have psychological grit.

Speaking of me brings up another point about perseverance and grit; namely, that teaching people is about more than just choice words, it's about modeling behavior. So how gritty am I?

A friend came to visit for a couple days, and I used her visit as an excuse to skip my morning mini-routine of yoga, and came downstairs to my comfy tea and reading chair to wait for her. While sitting there, I heard thumps coming from upstairs. At first I thought maybe my friend's son was up early and dropping books on the floor, but then I thought maybe she was doing yoga. I wondered how on earth, since the room is tiny, and when the rollaway bed is open, there is not enough room to stretch out on the floor. When my friend came downstairs, I discovered she had been the one thumping upstairs. She was indeed doing yoga in that tiny room. How? By folding up that rollaway bed. 

Would I have done that? Probably not. Possibly, she has a lot more grit than I do. Or, you know, a couple extra inches in height can make a big difference. I find folding that thing nearly impossible. Not impossible, but nearly so. Enough so that it’s a deterrent to me doing it myself. I can’t really reach across it well because my arms are too short. Because I don’t have those extra couple inches. Or maybe because my boobs are too big, adding a couple extra inches in width that render reaching across to close that thing and hook it next to impossible. Painful, even. But my friend has those extra couple inches in height, minus those extra in boobage, and therefore, I guess, was undaunted.  

I am not that gritty. At least not physically. I lack physical grit. This was brought home to me in numerous ways over the years I lived in New England and hung around with a lot of native Yanks. I’m thinking in particular of a humbling bike trip from Somerville to the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, about eleven miles, undertaken with our group of friends, subscribers to the Penny Pincher Gazette. I was going to say “subscribers all” to the Penny Pincher, but I know that’s untrue. They are thriftier than that and pass it around among them. That is how thrifty and gritty they are. Anyway, my point is, this bike trip involved hills like you’d not believe, and even though there were others as unused to arduous bike trips as I on our expedition, I was the only one whose 21 speeds proved insufficient and who had to walk her bike up one – or two, or several but who’s counting? – of those hills. 

But psychologically, I have grit and stamina. Today, I awoke to a loud boom – I offer this as an example of my psychological grit – which I attributed to a bomb for only a second, just one split second. I only wasted a split, split second of this morning on the idea of terrorism in my leafy suburb in upstate New York that is on absolutely nobody’s list of ideal places to make a violent political statement. Directly I had that thought, I knew that noise had to be related to the demolition of the burned house that has finally begun, around the u-bend of our street, five houses away. See? That’s how blasé and, well, gritty, I am. Yes, my first thought was: Bomb. Perhaps that's not the first thought my Yankee bicycling friends would have, but I had no control over it. The point is that it was only for an instant, and then I mastered the fear. Then I rationalized. That's grit. How else have I made it all these years without totally cracking? Considering my tendency to, um, panic. Sheer psychological grit. Grit that somehow links to my lack of physical grit in some kind of inverse relationship. It’s all of a piece. And by it I mean me. The ebb and flow of grit and no-grit that makes a person who she is. 

What I’m saying here, with these examples of my lack of physical grit and my questionable psychological stability, is that despite my weaknesses, my questioning, my struggles at times with motivation, I persevere. We each have our challenges - our issues, our childhoods, our illnesses, our phobias - that require grit. Sometimes the effort required might look to an outsider like just getting by. Sometimes that perseverance manifests in small wins. Sometimes perseverance manifests as big, public wins. Overall, do you keep going? Do you keep trying? I do. According to Carol Dweck, that is key to success. So – yay.

Everman's Lessons on Success

The day: sunny and gorgeous. It would be a perfect day for deck sitting, except the deck chairs are kind of wet. Though not

as wet as I expected. The manufacturer has injected some kind of miracle webbing into the cushion that didn’t release its inner core of wet until I’d sat on one for some time. Then I turned it over and water dripped out. Me – dry; inner core - dripping.

Also this is great because now I have something new to obsess over, namely, how evenly the cushions are drying. After a rainstorm, I can periodically, every hour or two, or every fifteen minutes - or every five, if I’m stuck for other more wholesome activities - go outside and rotate the cushions. Because that’s the kind of person I am. I haven’t felt this good about stuffed anything since I used to sit on my transitional object (Bunny) to press her face the right way. It was flat, and I wanted it to puff out. Of course. Never happy with what we have, are we? But, hey, bunnies’ faces puff out. They are not flat. I wanted my bunny’s face to be like a real bunny’s and puff out. Which it did, if I sat on Bunny just the right way. So that gave me something to do. And do. And do. And do.

Yes, this is Bunny. She is my bunny.

Is it any wonder my nursery school teacher recommended me for a little play therapy at 3? And clearly, it worked. Because.

Anyhoo, I was going to talk about something I read in The New York Times that maybe you read, too, Readers. I'm referring to that article about the guitarist Jason Everman, who was fired from Nirvana just before they hit it big, and then after touring with them for a year, got fired from Soundgarden just before they became massive, and then he joined the Army and eventually became a Special Forces soldier? After such public failures, then the guy goes off and does something that is highly specialized and secret and is kind of like joining a secret society because when you’re in Special Forces no one can know exactly what you do. Even after you’ve done it, you’re not supposed to talk about it, but those who are in the know - those who are in the band - know how very cool what you do and did is.

There’s a lesson here about success not lasting or not being meaningful if it’s not based on something you value. And I guess, also, his story is a parable of how fame and fortune don’t mean much, if you don’t love what you do. And Jason Everman didn’t love the rock life. He was, according to this article, an excellent musician, so he wasn’t fired for lack of talent. Ironically, he got fired both times because he didn’t gel with the band. He didn’t play with the team. I say this is ironic because what I know about the military is that it’s all about team effort. And I know a lot about the military. I saw “Private Benjamin.” By the way, “Saving Private Ryan,” was the last war movie I ever watched and I blame it for causing the umbilical cord to wrap tightly three times around my first child’s neck which led to a c-section. I one hundred percent believe that she was trying to escape the terrible noise in the movie theater and got herself tangled. My belly was lumping up and down like boiling water during that thing.

But I digress. My point is that although Jason Everman didn't want to be in a band, he did want to be in a band of a different kind. So he just kept trying to find the right kind. And he did.

By the way, I think it’s cool that Jason Everman’s name is almost EverYman, which adds a further parable-like element to his story. Everyman's search.

But also maybe there’s another lesson for me and people like me in his story. That lesson is that you can leave behind public humiliation and what looks like terrible failure. This is pertinent for me because, as I may have hinted or mentioned here and there, I’m circling around a book proposal. And I’m hesitant to write about it here. As I told the husband last night, I had nothing to blog about, because I wasn’t about to blog about writing a book, and he said, Well isn’t that what this whole thing is about? By "this whole thing" he meant my blog, but we can excuse his unclear antecedent, can we not? And I said, What if I fail to sell my proposal and fail to publish my book after broadcasting that I’m trying to on my blog? On my blog about success. And the husband, the ratfink, said I really should write about it, because after all isn’t that the crux of the question?  After which I told him it was time for his Vitamin D pills, so that while he was swallowing them he would stop challenging me.

Still, he made me think. I mean, have I blogged for the past two years about all the elements of success and wound up in the same spot I started, with the assumption that Everyone (my Readers and me) will consider me a failure until I succeed? Or have I learned that success is also a byproduct of enjoying the process of working toward a goal?

Well. What do you think, Readers?